'Alcohollywood' podcast celebrates film, mixology

The 85th Academy Awards aired Sunday on the ABC television network, and two hosts of a movie-themed podcast helped listeners create the perfect cocktail to accompany your choice for Best Picture.

Clint Worthington and Jared Latore were theatre students at Truman State University in Kirksville, Mo., when they met and became friends over watching films and, well, drinking. Worthington, Bushnell-Prairie City High School 2004 alumnus, was president of the university's filmmaker's club. Jared had a passion for mixology, or combining ingredients to make the perfect cocktail.

The two remained friends after graduation and wound up in the same city — Chicago — where they continued hanging out together to watch movies and, well, drink.

All along they had been thinking about preserving the cocktail recipes and drinking games they created while watching films and in October 2011 launched a weekly podcast, "Alcohollywood."

The premise is simple: A film review, one cocktail recipe and a drinking game with three rules plus a "finish your drink" line, or cue to finish the drink.

The podcast has gathered a loyal following and in January Worthington and Latore attended the New Media Expo in Las Vegas, Nev., as nominees for the Best Food and Drink podcast. The Alcohollywood hosts didn't win, but they got to network with others in Internet podcast business. They also managed to snag a big-time guest for a show recorded at the expo: John Campea, AMC Movie News Senior Editor, joined them for a review of the 1971 James Bond flick "Diamonds Are Forever."

Worthington is an avid listener of podcasts himself and took inspiration for Alcohollywood from "How Did This Get Made?," which features a discussion of films considered to be, well, just plain bad.

On Alcohollywood, Worthington and Latore and the occasional guest panelist discuss a wide range of films, but like "How Did This Get Made?," most of them fall into the realm of "bad."

"That's for a number of factors," Worthington said. "Given the audience that enjoys this kind of podcast, the kind that grew up with Mystery Science Theatre 3000, it just works better to review bad films. Also bad movies are the ones you're more prone to drink to. But we'll alternate doing good movies with bad movies. And we try to do movies that people can access, like on Netflix."

Latore, who creates the accompanying cocktail for each film, looks for inspiration in the movie's setting and characters.

"If it's a desert setting, I'll make a very dry cocktail," he said. "If it's a period film, I'll make classic cocktail. When we did 'Conan the Barbarian,' that was hard to get inspiration for, because beer wasn't even invented yet. So I went to something very 'manly.'"

That would be The Riddle of Steel in honor of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who starred in the 1982 film. The cocktail is made with whiskey, orange liqueur, gold tequila, amaretto and splash of bitters.

By the way, the drinking game rules Worthington and Latore created for "Conan the Barbarian" are: 1) Drink for lines of dialogue (lines being an entire piece of dialogue from an individual), 2) Drink for snake iconography (images of snakes, not real snakes/things that are supposed to be real snakes), and 3) Drink whenever you see fire.

While mixology comes easily to Latore, he admitted to being a late bloomer on the alcohol front.

"I didn't have my first cocktail until I was a sophomore in college," he said. "But I was raised a Catholic so you could say I've been drinking since the second grade."

Worthington said the challenge of recording the podcast is keeping it balanced between discussion of the film and discussion of the cocktail.

"There are some podcasts that are drunker than others," he admitted with a laugh. "Those are worst ones because you get off topic really easily. It's just about finding ways to keep the conversation interesting."

The Alcohollywood website catalogues the podcasts and cocktail recipes, which are searchable by film genre. At the bottom of the main page there's also a button to offer a donation, but Worthington admits there isn't money to be made in the podcast business — at least not yet. A friend of Worthington and Latore maintains the website, and the band A Giraffe provided a jazzy, Hollywood-style theme song that's heard at the beginning of every podcast.

In addition to the January trip to the New Media Expo in Las Vegas, the Alcohollywood hosts sponsored a film at the B-Fest an annual event held at Northwestern University. In the future, they would like to have a few ads on their website and get a few corporate sponsorships.

Eventually, Worthington and Latore would like to publish a coffee table book of their collected cocktail recipes and drinking games.

"Our first idea that we want to get back to is a coffee table book," Worthington said. "That's kind of our end game."

Worthington and Latore also have day jobs. Worthington is a production manager for Coriolis Theatre Company in Chicago and a freelance copy editor, and Latore is a waiter at an organic restaurant, Prasino.

For now, they are happy to continue meeting once a week for a movie — good or bad — and a cocktail.

"We have a lot of fun doing the show we love all of our fans," Latore said. "Even if we didn't do the show, we would still get together every week, so we might as well have something to show for it."

The Alcohollywood podcast is available free on iTunes and Stitcher Radio — a free app for listening to podcasts and radio stations — as well as on the Alcohollywood website, www.alcohollywood.com.

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